Saturday, 5 July 2014

EFFLUENT AND CYNICISM

In October 2010 a sewage pipe burst in the away dressing room at The Stadium of Light. Manchester United were the visitors.

The burst
sewage pipe in the away dressing room at the Stadium of Light was the cause of
some merriment for the man from the newsagent's. "They said the whole
place was filled with liquid excrement," he said. "And we weren't
even playing the Boro."

He let out a noise that sounded like an asthmatic hyena playing the kazoo and
added: "I said: 'And we weren't even playing the Boro,'" in case the
only Middlesbrough fan in the shop (me) missed it the first time. And then he
said: "Are you not wanting a Kit Kat today?"

You might think this an example of customer care straight from the Ryan Air Manual, but we have to make allowances for the man in the newsagent's. Half a
lifetime as a Sunderland fan in a Newcastle-supporting areahas left him
all bitter and twisted. As a Middlesbrough fan the same thing might have
happened to me. Luckily, when I arrived here 20 years ago I was already so
bitter and twisted from supporting the Boro for three decades that if anything
the added sourness and torque have gentled my disposition.

The start Steve Bruce's team have made to this Premier League season has at
least got the bloke from the newsagent's off his twin favourite topics: Len
Shackleton and Kevin Keegan, two footballers who represent the yin and yang of
his life. As other men have had "love" and "hate" tattooed
on their fists, so might he have had "Shack" and "Keegan"
etched on his. Although, obviously to do so he'd have to have five fingers on
one hand and six on the other, which as the barber pointed out is an unlikely
configuration "even for someone who was born in Murton, like he
was".

I should say that, in my view, this is a slight on Murton, though I have
visited the Durham village only once, admittedly. That was back in the days
when they still had a team in the Northern League. My friends and I had got off
the bus from Durham City and were struggling to locate a pub, The
International. It was raining. The afternoon was so dark that even if the
workers' flag were flying you wouldn't have been able to see it from a distance
of more than six feet.

The streets of Murton were deserted. The chip shop on the corner with the sign
in the window proclaiming the availability of something called a "Dona
Kebab" (whether a misspelling or an unfortunate fate for some poor woman,
I cannot say) was shut.

As we began to despair, and consider suicide, or a trip to Spennymoor, a bloke
lurched into view from a side street. He was walking in the classic manner of
the daytime drunk, with his feet planted far apart as if to brace himself
against the swell of the pavement, a grin on his face proclaiming: "I'm
blattered, but I'm getting away with it."

We stopped him and asked the way. He gave us directions and as we walked off
bawled after us: "The beer's piss, mind, lads." Kirstie Allsopp would
doubtless get all prissy about the lack of dado rails, but I find it impossible
not to warm to a place like that.

Any road, the barber said that he had heard something about the sewage pipes in
the Manchester United dressing room. Looking around as if suspecting an
eavesdropper, he lowered his voice so that only the entire shop could hear, and
said: "Cut deliberately. By person, or persons unknown." He raised
his eyebrow: "So you know who that means, don't you?"

It was plain from the way he told us this that the barber believes showering
Rio Ferdinand with shit on purpose is somehow morally more repugnant than doing
it by accident. Personally, I am not so sure. Because, to be honest, I still
haven't forgiven the England centre-back for that World Cup prank programme.

Still, it must be stated clearly that there is nothing whatsoever to suggest
that anything the barber has said on the subject of the Stadium of Light burst
sewage pipe (or indeed on "that business" with three Newcastle
players involved – a tale for which the world is not yet ready. And won't be
until all three are dead and therefore beyond the protection of our libel laws)
is in anyway correct. Nothing except historical precedent, anyway.

Because football dressing rooms have been sabotaged in some pretty vile ways
over the years. Showers have been cold, salt has been supplied instead of sugar
with the half-time tea and there have been accusations of rotten fish being
placed in the heating ducts.

Perhaps the weirdest example was that of the Alnwick Town chairman John Common,
who made a habit of leaving a dead animal ("The smallest a mole, the
largest a sheep" according to the official history of the Northern League)
in the visitors' changing area. Mr Common claimed that this was done in a
spirit of impish fun – a practical joke of Ferdinand-esque proportions.

"Pity it didn't happen when your lot were playing there, isn't it?"
the barber said. "Being surrounded by evil-smelling filth – it would have
made the Boro feel like they were at home, wouldn't it?"

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.